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aeyl at 09:51 AM on 10 August 2022Electrifying transportation reduces emissions AND saves massive amounts of energy
I am very grateful for Karin and Yale Climate Connections for publishing this concise, but thorough and well-illustrated article. I was amazed when learning about the free energy change of the hydrocarbon combustion reaction in college chemistry and realized that the internal combustion engine (ICE) was wasting all the heat energy. I have been telling people about the inherent energy inefficiency of ICE powered cars for years and usually get blank stares. Perhaps, now that EVs are becoming much more common and I can use some of the great illustrations from this article, I will have better success!
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scaddenp at 06:45 AM on 10 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
More from the Ito and Masanaga paper:
"The longwave CRE at midnight infers a negative feedback just as predicted by the stability iris hypothesis, while the noontime CRE suggests a weak positive feedback in which the shortwave heating owing to a shrinkage of anvil clouds slightly outruns the longwave effect. These competing effects are estimated to largely cancel each other out when aver-aged over a diurnal cycle. The stability iris effect is suggested to be nearly radiatively neutral in a climatological context, although away from neutrality on subdaily time scales."
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shauno at 06:27 AM on 10 August 2022The Debunking Handbook 2020: Downloads and Translations
Wonderful information, thank you. I would like to propose that words like "true" and "correct" be avoided (these are not used in any good scientific papers that I have read), and that terms like "most accurate" or "highly accurate" be used instead. All our ideas about the world are models, they are human inventions, and their correspondence with reality seems to never be perfect, even in the case of our most accurate theory, the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics.
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shauno at 06:13 AM on 10 August 2022The Debunking Handbook 2020: Downloads and Translations
I struggled to download the Debunking Handbook, but after about 4 attempts I was successful
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Bob Loblaw at 22:50 PM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
Based on MA Rodger's comment, I took a quick look at the references. A lot that are more than 10 years old, and a couple of the recent "references" are to stuff at the CO2 Coalition. A lot of self-references, too.
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MA Rodger at 22:22 PM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
I don't have a problem accessing Lindzen & Choi (2022) 'The Iris Effect: A Review'. The problems with any post-2011 up-date start when you do access Lindzen & Choi (2022). The vast majority of the 5,000-plus word account is re-fighting lost battles of the past, battles that actually pre-date the SkS OP above. In essence, all Lindzen & Choi are saying is that climatology has yet to nail down cloud feedbacks so don't forget the Iris Effect, although they give little enough reason for such remembering. And while Lindzen attempts to relive the past, the work on clouds continues along as it always did, including tropical ocean cloud with recently for instance Ito & Masunaga (2022) 'Process level assessment of the iris effect over tropical oceans' stating their "results show that a theory focusing on the air temperature structure around anvil clouds is likely at work in the tropical atmosphere, although the anvil's warming and cooling effects would offset each other during the whole day and night."
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Eclectic at 19:51 PM on 9 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
CloudySky @653 (and recent others) :
You yourself will be "heavily funded" [your quote] by the Nobel Committee for Physics, just as soon as you publish your scientific paper showing that the surface temperature of Venus [about 460 degreesC] is due to your secret newly-discovered physics (which excludes greenhouse effects).
(The incident sunlight i.e. solar irradiation at Venus is amost exactly twice that at Earth.)
Perhaps a double-header Nobel Prize is coming your way, CloudySky? You could also garner the Nobel Prize for Medicine, if you can show that Venus's feverish temperature is due to an . . . ah . . . ahem . . . Venereal condition.
I hope your legislators vote to cool the charade of global warming, by at least 1 degree.
Moderator Response:[BL] The comment you responded to has been deleted, due to it being another incarnation of a banned user.
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Eclectic at 15:59 PM on 9 August 2022Science and its Pretenders: Pseudoscience and Science Denial
Rosross @3 , please give details of your criticism of King.
A quick glance at her website is not showing me where she's wrong.
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rosross at 15:11 PM on 9 August 2022Science and its Pretenders: Pseudoscience and Science Denial
Having looked at King's site it is perhaps depressing that she demonstrates such high levels of subjective bias in regard to certain issues such as non-allopathic medicine. Surely if one is going to take a position to defend real science, which is invaluable, then she should apply the criteria to her own writings.
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Eclectic at 14:34 PM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
Whdaffer , my first attempt failed to access the Lindzen article.
Overall, it would be helpful if you gave a brief summary of any noteworthy points in that article.
Prof. Lindzen has had a rather disappointing track record since his academic retirement ~ so it would be interesting to see if he has come up with something really new & valuable. Over to you !
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whdaffer at 10:53 AM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
Sorry. The direct link is...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13143-021-00238-1Moderator Response:[BL] Link activated. (It works for me.)
The web software here does not automatically create links. You can do this when posting a comment by selecting the "insert" tab, selecting the text you want to use for the link, and clicking on the icon that looks like a chain link. Add the URL in the dialog box. -
whdaffer at 10:52 AM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
The last update to this article was 2011.
Lindzen has a review article out (link below) that discusses work that's happened since. I was wondering if there were plans to update this article in light of the work since 2011.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022APJAS..58..159L/abstract -
Bob Loblaw at 04:35 AM on 9 August 2022It's the sun
HK @ 1303:
Those numbers are consistent with other sources.
Note that the shorter wavelengths do not reach the earth's surface. They are absorbed in the upper atmosphere - e.g., by ozone in the stratosphere. Absorption of radiation is what heats the stratosphere, as seen in this image I linked to in another thread last week (from Manabe and Weatherald, 1967):
This page, from highly-respected radiation instrumentation company Kipp and Zonen, gives a breakdown of atmospheric transmission of various wavelengths.
https://www.kippzonen.com/Knowledge-Center/Theoretical-info/Solar-Radiation
The shorter UV-B and UV-C wavelegnths are either mostly or completely absorbed before reaching the surface. A table from that page:
The low amounts of energy in those short wavelengths - plus the low amounts that penetrate past the stratosphere - are the main reason that climate "skeptics" look for indirect effects, such as cloud formation, cosmic rays, etc. (They are still looking...)
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:42 AM on 8 August 20222022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #31
An undeniable problem is the ways that pursuers of perceptions of superiority in competition for popularity or profit claim that the following is ‘not their responsibility’: “Pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding applied to limit harm done and sustainably improve conditions for people needing assistance”
The article “Behind the Scenes. British Media's Climate Denial” provides modern day examples of the mechanisms of Edward S. Herman’s “Propaganda Model” (presented in the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, updated in 2002, and in the 1992 documentary of the same name). It also presents the problem of the ‘cult of personality’ which is part of what Susan Cain presented in her 2012 book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”.
In “Quiet: ...” Susan Cain highlights the now undeniably tragic cultural shift that started in the USA in the 1800s. Cultural historian Warren Susman's work identified that America shifted from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His evaluation included a review of self-help books where he identified the dramatic shift of terms used to describe the desired person (to the detriment of people wanting to be helpful developers of a sustainable better future for humanity). In the Culture of Character the most common terms were: Citizenship, Duty, Work, Golden deeds, Honor, Reputation, Morals, Manners, Integrity. The terms most common in the new Culture of Personality are: Magnetic, Fascinating, Stunning, Attractive, Glowing, Dominant, Forceful, Energetic.
The dominant behaviours of the Cult of Personality have little to do with increased awareness and improved understanding in pursuit of sustainable improvements and limiting harm done. In fact, there are many reasons for the winners in the Cult of Personality to dislike evidence-based pursuit of sustainable improvements and limits on harm done. They desperately promote the belief that increased awareness and improved understanding is a Conspiracy of Fake News by all those evil Others.
Authoritarian tyranny thrives on the denial of evidence-based common sense and the nonsensical creation of eternal enemies by groups like Populist Nationalists, leadership competitors who make up stories about how Others threaten the greatness and purity of ‘Their sub-set of humanity’. And many of those types of leaders have clearly promoted the claim that climate scientists, and others, who aspire to the Culture of Character are part of that Conspiracy of Others.
A related news story about ways that some political players are being more aggressively divisively misleading is the following NPR item “Republicans have long feuded with the mainstream media. Now many are shutting them out”.
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It's the sun
krit242 at @1298
As Bob Loblaw pointed out in @1300, the total energy emitted by the Sun at shorter wavelengths is very limited. The Sun isn’t a perfect blackbody, but it’s reasonably close, so I used the Blackbody Calculator at spectralcalc.com to find the energy emitted at those shorter wavelengths as a percentage of the Sun’s total energy output. This was the result when the temperature was set to 5772 K:UV-A (315-400 nm): 8.03 %
UV-B (280-315 nm): 2.05 %
UV-C (200 -280 nm): 1.95 %
F-UV (122-200 nm): 0.15 %
0-122 nm: 0.0002 % -
One Planet Only Forever at 06:55 AM on 7 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #30 2022
David-acct,
Your apparently insightful critique of "Clean Energy Investments are the Antidote to Inflation" prompted me to read it (and understand it).
I read the full article, including the footnotes. I did not read all the footnote referenced documents. But I read the summary of the “Mobilizing for a Zero Carbon America: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, and More Jobs” in footnote 16 that you specifically refer to.
I offer the following alternative perspective regarding your points. I have a BSc in Engineering and an MBA obtained in the 1980s. And I have had a successful career in engineering consulting that requires constant pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding of what is harmful and how to limit harm. So my perspective may differ from yours for many reasons.
- Indeed, a fundamental finance understanding is that governing financial actions, especially by central banks, can affect inflation. But that understanding does not discredit the evidence-based understanding presented in footnote 1 for the rapid recent increase of price for fossil fuels causing 41% of recent inflation: “The fossil fuels used in this calculation are fuel oil, gasoline, and natural gas. The calculation reflects inflation from February to June 2022. In addition to the 41 percent of inflation directly attributable to fossil fuel price increases, further inflation is attributable to price increases in other consumer goods caused by high fossil fuel prices.”
- ‘Lax monetary policy’ is a vague term. Please be more specific and I will consider if you have a valid point about that.
- The article actually states that people would have benefited if they had already converted from fossil fuel use to electricity use: "The study also addresses the economics of a Maximum Feasible Transition, finding that, even though meaningful amounts of capital will need to be invested, the efficiencies associated with electrification will end up saving the average household up to $2,000 per year in reduced energy costs”
- The potential to save some money by replacing fossil fuel equipment with newer fossil fuel equipment is not relevant to the point being made. Replacing older fossil fuel equipment with newer fossil fuel equipment may be beneficial compared to continuing to run the older equipment. But it would be less beneficial to the homeowner and the future of humanity.
- The article's point about the volatility of fossil fuels relative to the pricing of electricity is strengthened by the increased stability of pricing of electricity as renewable generation increases, with the related understanding that the full costs of using fossil fuels will need to be paid for. Energy sources like sunlight and wind are not subject to price increases like fossil fuels. And fossil fuels will undeniably get more expensive even if carbon fees are not imposed, because that is what happens to non-renewable resources that people compete to benefit from.
- The more comprehensive statement made about jobs is: “Based on comprehensive and granular research, the new study finds that in practice such a transition can create up to 25 million jobs in the near-term. This transition will also create an estimated 5 million jobs sustained over time, which is roughly double the number of jobs supported by today’s energy industry.” The large number of ‘short-term jobs’ is consistent with the way many things, including pipelines, are promoted (regional short-term jobs along the way are counted as ‘a job’).
Do you have any other points you want to attempt to make(up)?
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Bob Loblaw at 23:49 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory:
Further to your comment 646, you say
"Now I realize that the bottom layer of the atmosphere (near the surface) will warm the layers above it, but that is irrelevant regarding the water vapor feedback loop. In this case, we are only interested in what warming occurs at altitudes where there is still liquid or solid state H2O available in order to complete the loop."
This is also incorrect, for more than one reason. When the lower atmosphere warms, if will hold more water vapour. More water vapour will affect radiation transfer, because your "saturation" argument is wrong. And since the lower and upper atmosphere are linked together into a complex energy balance, what happens in the lower atmosphere does not stay in the lower atmosphere. We do not require that the warming happen in the upper atmosphere - in fact I have already given you a reference to a paper and a figure (in comment 645) that shows that the upper troposphere does not warm in response to increased CO2.
That paper gives extensive discussion of the role that water vapour plays. In fact, the title of that paper "Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity" is a direct indication of the purpose of that study. It contrasts with an earlier paper that assumed constant absolute humidity - i.e., no water vapour feedback. The earlier paper is:
Read those two papers. Look at the figures, sort out why the two models are different and why their results are different.
Moderator Response:[BL] OldHickory has been identified as a sock puppet of a previously banned user, so no further comments will be appearing from him.
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Bob Loblaw at 23:28 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory @ 646 and 648
Although you have not explicitly stated your definition of "saturation", the reference you provide to Barton Paul Levenson's web page suggests that you are making the argument based on transmission through a finite distance of a medium, as calculated from the Beer-Lambert law.
The Beer-Lambert Law is an exponential decay, and as a result the absorption never reaches 100%. Thus, to use it as an argument for "saturation", you need to make an argument of the form "this is close enough to 100% for all practical purposes". On Levenson's page, he uses 99% to perform the calculations he presents in his table 1.
The catch is, for any given distance you choose where absorption is 99% (and transmission is 1%), I can give you a shorter distance where absorption is less than 99% - even as low as 1%, if I make it short enough. Even if you choose something more that 99%, I can always choose a shorter path with a much lower absorption total.
Let's call your distance L1, and my distance L2. Your "saturation" argument is that increasing CO2 will have a negligible change on tramission through the layer to L1, since it is already almost 100%. But it will have an effect. If the original result is 99%, and increasing the absorption so that it is now 99.6%, is the change important? Well, you will probably argue that 99% and 99.6% are "the same for all practical purposes" - in fact, your "saturation" argument is completely dependent on making such a claim.
But what is the difference if we look at my distance. L2? What was 1% absorption is now 1.2%, and your saturation argument also depends on claiming that 1% and 1.2% are "the same for all practical purposes". The catch is, they are not. We are nowhere close to "saturation", and absorbing 1.2X greater radiation is significant.
One of the major factors in the radiative transfer equations is that absorbed radiation energy will most likely eventually be emitted again, and that emission will be equally likely to be up or down. Small changes in absorption lead to a larger number of absorbed/reemitted cycles before radiation is lost to space from the upper atmosphere, and as that number increases, so does the radiative greenhouse effect.
Your "saturation" argument depends on looking at the process as a single layer, thick enough that you reach "close enough to 100% for all practical purposes", and it fails because you are rolling the effect of many atmospheric layers into one.
I suggest that you read this post on the Beer-Lambert Law (including the comments).
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MA Rodger at 19:31 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory @646&648,
You say @646 "I realize that the bottom layer of the atmosphere (near the surface) will warm the layers above it" and also "adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the CO2 greenhouse warming, but at altitudes well above..." So if you realize the lower atmosphere warming will heat the upper atmosphere and adding atmospheric CO2 will warm the upper atmosphere, why do you think that high-up CO2 warming will have no warming effect near the surface?
CO2 warming occurs in the troposphere. The troposphere contains atmospheric cells (as illustrated above) in which downward air increases in temperature because it is being pressurised as it decends. There is no energy transfer in this warming, just pressurisation. So any warming will transfer top-to-bottom, just as it does botom-to-top. It does not matter if the warming is high or low, it will warm the entire troposphere. And warming at the surface will then increase atmospheric water vapour providing the feedback warming. -
Eclectic at 18:41 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory @648 : thank you for expanding on the matter ~ but there is still a major shortfall in your comment. Not only miscommunication - which may partly be a verbal/semantic problem - but it appears even more certain that you have not grasped the essence of how "greenhouse" warms the lower atmosphere.
Once you have truly grasped how H2O , CO2 , etcetera operate in the atmosphere, you will see why all the climate scientists (including the famous contrarian Professor Lindzen) are in agreement on the actual mechanism of planetary "greenhouse". It seems you have confused yourself about the question of "near the surface of the earth ... is highly saturated". [your quote]
As I mentioned earlier, the "saturation" question is not really relevant. It is not the "saturation" which is important, but the concentration (as in greenhouse gas molecules per cubic millimeter . . . or cubic meter . . . or what-have-you ). Any level of concentration will produce some greenhouse, and as you increase the concentration, there comes an increase in warming effect. The effective increase is not exactly logarithmic, but for (just) CO2 in the recorded range of recent times [say 180 - 420ppm] the surface warming effect works out to be approx 1.2 degreesC for a doubling of CO2 concentration. On top of that, must be added the feedback warming from the consequent rise in atmospheric H2O vapor (a figure somewhat greater than 1.2C) .
OldHickory, you will understand that I am not wishing to write a large number of paragraphs to explain all this in greater detail personally to you. This SkS website exists for the express purpose of providing a wealth of climate science information. It is your duty to yourself, to go and really read the original article at the head of this thread, at the Basic & Intermediate & Advanced levels. And to read other related articles here at SkS and elsewhere. When you have done that, it will become obvious why all the scientists are right.
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OldHickory at 17:21 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
Where I believe the climate scientists are wrong is in their common response to climate change skeptics about why we need to be concerned about atmospheric CO2 when it is H2O vapor that is the much stronger GHG. Their answer to this question is the claim of a water vapor feedback (also called a CO2 "control knob") as explained in the rebuttal of Climate Myth 36. This only works, however, if the CO2 greenhouse effect isn't already saturated, and more CO2 actually does give a rise in temperature. Eventually, after adding enough CO2, the rise in temperature starts to decline when adding more CO2, and in fact approaches zero. At this point, we say the CO2 greenhouse effect is saturated. Well, it turns out that near the surface of the earth, this effect is highly saturated, and even doubling the CO2 concentration would not result in any signficant temperature change. This, of course, means that the "control knob" fails, and we need not worry about CO2 emissions, anthropogenic or otherwise.
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Eclectic at 12:55 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
My apologies, OldHickory @646 and prior ~ but I am having difficulty understanding exactly where you think the climate scientists are wrong about the physics of climate. And it's likely that other readers are sharing my difficulty.
Please explain yourself more clearly. You seem to be ignoring the effect of the atmospheric Lapse Rate, which is so crucial to the mechanism of "greenhouse".
And infra-red photons from the planetary surface can only go a short distance before being absorbed by a CO2 or H2O molecule. Most of those photons would not even reach the rooftop of your house. So in that sense you can say that the lower atmosphere is "saturated" for CO2 , H2O etcetera ~ and it would be "saturated" whether the CO2 level were 200ppm or 400ppm or 800ppm or 1600ppm.
But the concentration level of greenhouse gasses at the bottom of our atmosphere will directly affect the concentration level near the TOA, and the TOA (for each specific gas) is the level where the infra-red is radiated out into space. The lower levels of air have a colossal re-cycling of IR photon energy . . . but what ultimately matters is the temperature of the TOA level. Because that is the level from which our planet loses (to space) the heat energy being gained from the sun. (Here I am disregarding the directly reflected sunlight from Earth's surface; and also the small portion being the IR "window" where IR of that wavelength that can pass directly through the air & clouds).
And the TOA temperature is dependent on the Lapse Rate. Conversely, the Lapse Rate determines the surface temperature, if you care to think about it in that way.
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OldHickory at 11:56 AM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
After reviewing several papers on the topic, I can only conclude that the water vapor feedback loop (from Climate Myth 36) is not possible due to saturation of the CO2 greenhouse effect. As noted in The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters, the saturation length for the (most important) 14.99 micron CO2 absorption line at a partial pressure of 0.0004 atm is about 18 meters. Also, the author dana1981 of the rebuttals for this Is the CO2 effect saturated? forum stated the claim is true that adding more CO2 won't absorb much more IR radiation at the surface.
Now I realize that the bottom layer of the atmosphere (near the surface) will warm the layers above it, but that is irrelevant regarding the water vapor feedback loop. In this case, we are only interested in what warming occurs at altitudes where there is still liquid or solid state H2O available in order to complete the loop.
In general, we can expect that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the CO2 greenhouse warming, but at altitudes well above that which would result in a CO2 "control knob" or disruptions to the weather or climate. Therefore, atmospheric H2O is in fact the dominant and controlling GHG and Climate Myth 36 actually isn't a myth.
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David-acct at 11:19 AM on 6 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #30 2022
The Article "Clean Energy Investments are the Antidote to Inflation" by Rewiring America 7-14-2022 which is included in the above list is a fasinating article on benefits of completely electrifying peoples homes and eliminating all the fossil fuel appliances and heating.
Though there were a few things in the article that caught my eye.
The article mentions that converting to electricity from natural gas will reduce the effect of inflation since 41% of the inflation has occurred since putins invasion of Ukraine. Its been well known in economic areana that the primary driver of inflation is lax monetary policy, so while oil prices have been a major component of the inflation over the last 18-24 months, the lax monetary policy has been the primary driver of inflation.
The article notes that if homeowners would save a approximately $1,000 over a year by converting from gas to electric. Though installing new equipment almost always cuts utility bills simply because new units are more efficient whether it is gas to gas, gas to electric, electric to electric or even electric to gas. The article also omits any mention of the cost of installing new equipment. The typical payback period for new furnace and / or ac or both is 8-12 on the average.
the article frequently mentions that oil prices are more volitale than electric prices though again that omits context. electricity prices will always be less volitale than oil & gas prices since A) the electric utility markets are regulated, b) the fuel sources for electricity is from several sources so there is the natural diversification in costs, c) electric utilities purchase fuel costs using long term contracts therefore their costs are far less effected by daily fluctuations in pricing along with using cash flow hedging to dampen the impact of short term price fluctuations.
The Article also mentions the millions of jobs created by electrifying homes. The article specifically references the study in footnote 16 "mobilizing for zero carbon america" that study estimated the 25 milllion jobs would be created. The US workforce in currently 170million, so even if only have those new jobs were created, that would still be 5%-9% increase in employment, which is totally implausible.
In summary, the article paints a very glossy picture via the omission of data that would provide appropriate context.
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One Planet Only Forever at 02:41 AM on 6 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #31 2022
Presentations like “Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios” are what matter most in science.
And the matter is more than "Given our circumstances and the wellspring of advice at hand, we'd be stupid not to pay attention." Not pursuing increased awareness and improved understanding and applying it to limit harm done and help those needing assistance is unethical - immoral.
Ethical Scientists need to maintain a focus on identifying the harm done by developed human activity. The marketplace competition for perceptions of superiority based on popularity and profit has proven to be uninterested in identifying and limiting harm done.
In the 2022 book “What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care” Elizabeth Cripps provides a well-reasoned moral/ethical understanding built on the thoughtful work of many others.
The bottom line understanding undeniably includes:
- the impacts of everyone’s thoughts and resulting actions add up to become the future reality.
- it is catastrophic for anyone to choose to act in ways that are unnecessarily harmful
- it is sad and harmful when a person chooses to be less helpful than they could be
The question of ‘unnecessary harm’ leads to understanding that only people living less than a basic decent life can be excused for acting harmfully in pursuit of a basic decent life. But the actions taken to achieve a basic decent life need to be as harmless as possible. Others who are living ‘better than basic decent lives’ at least owe assistance that they can easily provide to help those living less than basic decent lives sustainably improve their lives. In many cases the least that is owed is ‘to seek out and vote for leaders who would lead effective collective efforts to limit harm done and sustainably improve conditions for those who live less than basic decent lives’.
That ethical understanding makes it plain that people living more than basic decent lives are only pursuing ‘wants’, not ‘needs’. Pursuit of improved circumstances above a basic decent life ‘need’ to be essentially harmless because everyone doing a little bit of unnecessary harm can easily add up to a massive amount of harm. And any claim that ‘it is harmful to limit the excess harmful actions of people who are enjoying more than basic decent lives’ is an absurd, but potentially very popular and profitable, argument.
That understanding leads many people to try to deny that there is any harm being done by the harmful actions they developed a liking for. They try to deny there is any harm done by the undeniable increased CO2 due primarily to fossil fuel use. Some try to promote beliefs that there is no relationship between increased CO2 and harmful results of increased global average surface temperature (many of the items on the SkS list of “arguments” are versions of that).
The ability of misleading marketing efforts to tempt people to deny or excuse the unnecessary harmfulness of their chosen ways of enjoying ‘better than basic decent lives’ is potentially the most catastrophic thing that humans have developed. The resulting unsustainable harmful over-developed consumption by supposedly 'more advanced' people is a catastrophe. That portion of humanity 'is the asteroid ruining the future of humanity'.
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Fixitsan at 23:07 PM on 5 August 2022CO2 is just a trace gas
Ha ho and hee haw...the humour is , well, it just about qualifies as humour
MA Rodger the battery size is irrelvant to all but a pedant. but regardless of that the AAA battery can easily generate huge heat if applied to a low enough resistance where IR will pour forth. I accept there is current limiting in the form of a resistor in series with the led to protect it, but the wavelength quoted of 0.94 microns is not the same wavelength already quoted as being of concern which is 15 microns. (I actually think I used that as a reerence because it was in the wording of one of the links I have been sent by this forum's members, maybe it was even NASA, although that's unimportant now)
So back to the 15 micron wavelength IR , of which there is a lot in every home and factory and yet, the existence of any CO2 based heat trapping device or construction or insulation is completely absent in society.
Am I also correct in assuming there is no repeatable experiment which can be performed in a lab which proves the heat trapping quality of CO2 or is there an absence of such an experiment because CO2 possesses that quality only as a direct consequence of it's lower pressure, at high altitudes ? (But that seems unlikely, no ?)
I guess the question I have is, can it be proven beyond doubt that CO2 traps heat at all ?
Moderator Response:[BL] Skeptical Science is not place to to post random, irrelevant speculation.
Rather than choosing to follow the Comments Policy, Fixitsan has chosen a path that does not include continued posting here.
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Eclectic at 21:30 PM on 5 August 2022CO2 is just a trace gas
Fixitsan @40 : you have made a fundamental error.
The wit of man is not the wit of a sealion.
Indeed, few sealions are witty. If any. Such is the nature of the beast.
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MA Rodger at 21:11 PM on 5 August 2022CO2 is just a trace gas
Fixitsan @40,
A TV remote "has no heating component, as far as humans being able to feel" because it operates using just a couple of AAA batteries and, like the rest of the electro-magnetic spectrum, the wavelength used (0.94 microns) does indeed have a "heating component." And if you turn up the power, human beings will feel it.
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Fixitsan at 18:41 PM on 5 August 2022CO2 is just a trace gas
scaddenp, from taking your advice to look it up (and to double check my existing understanding) 15 micron infrared is 'thermal', or 'far infrared'
CO2 interactions at these wavelengths are considerable, or in other words CO2's energy absorption rate is highest with this far infrared, as opposed to near infrared, which is more like light and has no heating component, as far as humans being able to feel it is concerned (think infrared emitters in remote controls, cold to the touch)
What befuddles, is the fact that nowhere on earth at ground level has the science, the wit of man, or nature made use of this interactive property of CO2 with regards to the huge amounts of far infrared which is in among the built environment. From domestic appliances, to industrial applications, far infrared is abundant on earth's surface
Far infrared is also expensive, and hence why we choose to insulate with great care the manmade applications, generators or soaks of far IR in order to improve the efficiency of the gas, electricity, or solar derived application of IR.
Take a steel furnace for example, heavily insulated, you can imagine the amount of IR which could be lost without insulation. A domestic oven is barely different, and indeed, our homes are heated with far IR and we do our best to trap as much of that heat in as possible in order to keep the heating bills down. We do this with insulation, in the cavities between the external structural walls, in the double glazing, and even triple glazed windows, in the loft space and also under the floor.
Currently, most insulation contributes to heat storage by entrapping air in small volumes in a structural support, such as foams. We use foam boards, foam pellets, liquid expanding foams and so on, filled with air in many cases, in the small bubbles in the foam.
In double glazing we use Argon now, previously we used a vaccuum for example.
But, what we never use, is CO2. Yet, we see CO2 being portrayed as an immensely effective molecule which is purported to trap heat. That's an amazing property for any portable colourless gas to have. It has a lower thermal conductivity than Argon and would be batter in double glazing for that reason alone, and add into the equation the fact that it has an additional benefit over Argon that it traps long wave IR which we need to keep in our homes I am left wondering how it is we simply don't bother.
Argon is 23 times more plentiful in the atmosphere than CO2, perhaps that is reason enough to use it, but it is more expensive too.
Have we not reached the stage of thought yet where we can imagine that using the extremely strongly purported far IR heat trapping effects of CO2 in insulation down here at ground level, or, is there just something about CO2 which means it only traps heat in low pressure environments such as in the upper layers of the atmosphere ?
CO2 traps heat, but the wit of man has so far failed to put such an amazing property to any use on earth. How come ?
Moderator Response:[BL] This is all pointless, irrelevant, and incorrect rambling.
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Bob Loblaw at 22:01 PM on 4 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHIckory @ 643:
You have made some very vague, non-specific, non-quantitative statements.
As Eclectic points out, "saturation" can mean many things. You need to explicitly say exactly what you mean by that term, preferably with a mathematical expression.
"Enough CO2" is meaningless. With enough power, you can make a bathtub fly.
"So easy" is also meaningless.
"Would not cause much more warming" is a vague generality. How much is "much"? Bigger than a house? Smaller than a mouse?
People that actually do the math have shown that the global mean surface temperature will continue to warm for increasing amounts of CO2 untl CO2 reaches levels at least several times higher than they are now.
Your last sentence, where you say "more warming, either at the surface, high in the atmosphere, or anywhere in between" demonstrates a severe lack of understanding of the effects of CO2. Increasing CO2 leads to surface warming, but there is less warming the higher you go in the troposphere. At the tropopause, warming is negligible. In the stratosphere, increasing CO2 causes cooling. This was well understood as far back as the 1960s, in such papers as this one:
I refer you to figure 16 from that paper:
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Eclectic at 18:46 PM on 4 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory @643 ,
your final sentence is simply wrong.
It is a verbal/semantic problem which has confused you. Saturation is a term with several meanings ~ but if you look at the actual mechanism of the Greenhouse Effect (for all greenhouse gasses), then you will see that the important factor is the average inter-molecular distance between "greenhouse" molecules at the so-called Top-Of-Atmosphere . . . combined with the Lapse Rate.
Denser ("more saturated") CO2 at the surface level will result in a higher T-O-A where the sufficiently-large intermolecular distances are achieved to allow infra-red photons to escape the planet. And that TOA height (and thus temperature) will be different for different types of greenhouse gas (but making some allowance for any infra-red spectrum overlap).
In short, an increase in CO2 at ground level must result in more warming effect. And the effect is very far from negligible.
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OldHickory at 15:37 PM on 4 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
Regardless of where the CO2 greenhouse warming takes place, it will still saturate if enough CO2 is added. It is the very strong (but narrow) absorption lines in the IR spectrum of CO2 that makes it so easy for its greenhouse effect to saturate, and has nothing to do with location. Therefore, we should expect that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would not cause much more warming, either at the surface, high in the atmosphere, or anywhere in between.
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scaddenp at 07:44 AM on 4 August 2022CO2 is just a trace gas
Fixitsan, your instinct that 400 ppm is a small number is not helping you understand it's actual effect. Perhaps you need to also need realize that avagadro's number is very large.
Without looking it up, what does your instinct tell you about how far an infrared photon of appropriate wavelength would travel on average before interacting with a CO2 molecule (mean path length) for an atmosphere with 400ppm?
Now you can look it up...
You do not form accurate beliefs about the nature of reality from handwavy arguments that suit what you would like to believe. Scientists make as precise as possible predictions from theory and then make observations to check. The observed spectrum of infrared, whether measured at top of atmosphere by satellite or on earth surface match the predictions of greenhouse gas theory to a very high degree.
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Bob Loblaw at 06:22 AM on 4 August 2022There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature
ankit662003:
You are confusing "no net transfer" with "no transfer at all".
Adding $2000 to your bank account by depositing your paycheck, and then taking $2000 out to pay your bills results in no net change in your bank balance, but you still have $2000 as a "flux" in from your employer, and a $2000 "flux" out due to your withdrawal. Your bank account is in "equilibrium", but fluxes are not zero.
Likewise for energy. Even at local thermodynamic equilibrium, two objects can be exchanging energy it just has to be in equal quantities. And you need to consider all energy transfers - which in the atmosphere includes convection as well as IR radiation.
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Bob Loblaw at 06:12 AM on 4 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
No, OldHickory, you do not need a single-layer model. The entire atmosphere is coupled together as a series of layers. What happens in one layer (e.g. the upper atmosphere) then affects the fluxes with the layer below it, which affects the fluxes within the layer below that, etc. The net energy flux - all fluxes, radiative and convective - needs to adjust so that all layers are in local equilibrium (steady mean temperature).
What happens at the top of the atmosphere affects the entire profile, so that the lower layers (and surface) increase in temperature, which leads to more evaporation (where water is available). That increased evaporation leads to global average higher water vapour. That is the feedback loop.
It is an entire coupled system. Not one or two layers.
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ankit662003 at 05:42 AM on 4 August 2022There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature
@MA Rodge
Now an atmosphere becomes formed around the hot body which is warmed by the hot body (this atmospheric warming you apparently have no problem with), the atmosphere reaching a chilly -18ºC = 255K at equilibrium. Being warmer than absolute zero, the atmosphere will radiate upward into space and downward back to the hot body. So will the extra energy flux back to the hot body not have a heating effect? Note - if it doesn't we will have to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics and we are not very keen on doing that.
Pardon me, I am new here. And it has been 2 decades since I touched physics but doesn't thermodynamic equalibrim itself mean there will be no net energy transfers between the two objects?
First you state that there is equalibirm then you suggest there will be a net heat transfer, how is that possible? -
OldHickory at 05:16 AM on 4 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
As MA Rodger @638 points out, the CO2 greenhouse effect operates above the bulk of atmospheric water vapor, or atmospheric H20 in any phase. This is consistent with The Science of Doom website which states
The key point behind all the detail is that the top of atmosphere radiation change (as CO2 changes) is the important one. The surface change (forcing) from increasing CO2 is not important, is definitely much weaker and is often insignificant. Surface radiation changes from CO2 will, in many cases, be overwhelmed by water vapor.
Water vapor does not overwhelm CO2 high up in the atmosphere because there is very little water vapor there – and the radiative effect of water vapor is dramatically impacted by its concentration, due to the “water vapor continuum”.
So my question is if the CO2 greenhouse effect operates high in the atmosphere where there is very little H2O in any form, how is it possible for this greenhouse warming to cause further evaporation of condensed H2O (ie. liquid water or ice) in order to complete the water vapor feedback loop discussed in the debunking of Climate Myth 36? For this, it seems we do need the "single layer" model mentioned by BoB Loblaw @640. Otherwise, there is no correlation between the H20 and CO2 greenhouse warmings, and the controlling GHG would simply be the stronger of the two.
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MA Rodger at 01:07 AM on 4 August 2022Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK
Fixitsan @97,
I have replied to you off-topic comment on a more appropriate trhead.
Moderator Response:[BL] Please note that since moderation has been applied to Fixitsan's comment (to delete off-topic portions), regular readers can no longer see what he wrote.
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MA Rodger at 01:06 AM on 4 August 2022CO2 is just a trace gas
Fixitsan @97 elsewhere,
You say "I struggle to find anyone who can offer a sensible explanation why it is, that if 0.04% of the atmosphere consisting of CO2 traps significant heat, enough to warm the planet an estimated 1 Celsius in 1 century, why is CO2 at higher concentrations not used more often (or even ever) in common or garden insulation."
99.95% of the Earth's dry atmosphere comprises N2, O2 or Ar but they are transparent to IR. It requires a more complicated molecule to absorb or emit IR at the temperatures found in the Earth's atmosphere. So any IR passing through the atmosphere will only be absorbed by those more-complicated molecules and IR will only be emitted these same molecules.And this is only at certain wavelengths which equate to the various wobbles that can be induced in those molecules. Of these, in the dry atmosphere, the big daddy of the IR-reacting molecules is CO2 which acts at 15 microns wavelength (666 cm^-1 wavenumber). This effect is responsible for a big bite seen in the spectrum of IR emitted out into space.
Thus about 20% of the Earthly IR has to negotiate the CO2 in the atmosphere and this mechanism directly provides perhaps 7ºC of the full 33ºC pre-ndustrial greenhouse effect.
The important variable is the altitude at which the CO2 emits the 15 micron IR out into space, and specifically the temperature of that altitude. The hotter it is, the more IR is lost to space, helping to cool the planet. But a colder gases emits less and that then insulates the planet better.
Now, if the upper atmosphere at the altitudes at which CO2 allows this 15 micron IR to escape into space were really really really cold, you could double that direct 7ºC CO2 effect by blocking all the IR in that band. But you need that really really really cold temperature to achieve it.
So if you;re after "common or garden insulation", if you want to keep something warm by half-a-dozen degrees or more, it is far easier covering it with a more conventional insulating barrier.As far as anthropogenic global warming goes, filling the atmosphere with extra CO2 concentrations results in the space-bound IR in the 15 micron waveband being emitted at higher altitudes and, because those higher altitudes have a lower temperature, less IR will this be emitted in the 15 micron waveband out into space adding to the insulating greenhouse effect.
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Fixitsan at 22:32 PM on 3 August 2022Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK
""The relationship between temperature and CO2, and harmful consequences, is fairly obvious today"
I struggle to find anyone who can offer a sensible explanation why it is, that if 0.04% of the atmosphere consisting of CO2 traps significant heat, enough to warm the planet an estimated 1 Celsius in 1 century, why is CO2 at higher concentrations not used more often (or even ever) in common or garden insulation.
Could somebody explain the science about why we choose to fill double glazing cavities with argon, which has worse thermal conductivity and costs more than, CO2, when a change in concentration from 0.03% to 0.04% is considered to be significant.
Surely if we were to extrapolate further and suggest atmospheric CO2 were 0.1% then the theory holds the planet will be warmed much more than in the past during the period when the level rose from 0.03% to 0.04%, so I just wonder why, if CO2 is such a powerful heat trapping gas, it is not used anywhere at all in any way which makes use of that arguably excellent thermal property ?
The only time CO2 seems to have any ability to trap heat is in the upper atmosphere apparently, so why is that, specifically ?
Moderator Response:[BL] Off-topic deleted.
Please note that posting comments here at SkS is a privilege, not a right. This privilege can and will be rescinded if the posting individual continues to treat adherence to the Comments Policy as optional, rather than the mandatory condition of participating in this online forum.
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MA Rodger at 22:04 PM on 3 August 2022It's the sun
cgfree59 @1301,
The best initial assessment of any work by the Connolly brothers or Willie Soon is to assume it is yet another pile of their usual nonsense (I was much surprised recently seeing an NSIDC blog actually citing one of their papers for real!!) and given the lengths they go in obfuscating and misdirecting folk, this is not entirely a falacious use of an ad hominem argument.There are responses to this particular serving of nonsense Connolly et al (2021) 'How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate' (thus a layman's efforts or a reply from the numpties themselves to a criticism of press coverage of their paper) but I do not see anything here at SkS.
The conculsions of Connolly et al (2021) are to assert that the IPCC is premature with its conclusions as it ignores certain estimates of TSI and thus solar forcing which provide radically different results to the global warming attribution reached by the IPCC.
"Different TSI estimates suggest everything from no role for the Sun in recent decades (implying that recent global warming is mostly human-caused) to most of the recent global warming being due to changes in solar activity (that is, that recent global warming is mostly natural)."
You could expend time and effort trawling though Connolly et al (2021), picking out the obfuscation and misdirection they employ but the crux of it is the crazy method they use. That is they the employ blind curve-fitting of their preferred solar-caused climate forcing onto some crazy NH temperature estimates and only after this first-step into the lunatic asylum do they then get to attributing the left-overs of any temperature trends to anthropogenic forcings.
So the results are pure nonsense.
Further a rather telling observation is that of these TSI estimates which they claim are being ignored (TSI High Variability Estimates all plotted out in their Fig 3), only two would allow any naive correlation between rising global temperature with TSI through the all-important "recent decades."
One of these two exceptional TSI estimates was scaled from a postage-stamp-size graphic in Ammann et al (2007), a paper which contradicts the muppets in that it concludes:-"Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century.
The second is cherry-picked TSI estimate is from yet another tiny graphic (Fig 5b of Egorova et al 2018) in turn the trace being based on Muscheler et at (2016) which employs proxy data to create estimates of TSI, so not a precise method you would want to put much faith in.
The numpties offer no comment on such an obvious problem with their grand thesis, that it has such a narrow and less-than-reliable basis for the singularly important calculation within their account. Such an omission is a sign that you have strayed from reasonable analysis and entered the lunatic asylum. -
Jim Hunt at 21:00 PM on 3 August 2022Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK
Not that it will actually come to pass, but in recent related news:
For the first time in history, a deterministic model simulates 40 degrees over Denmark.
https://twitter.com/SebastianTV2dk/status/1554360935246094336 -
Fixitsan at 19:13 PM on 3 August 2022Record rain in St. Louis is what climate change looks like
I was just looking at the very beautiful 'live' GPM model by NASA showing where precipitation is most likely to occur on earth.
It seems to me that somewhere on the planet potentially record rainfall arrives every day.
If there is no rain guage at that location to measure it's accumulation then sadly it is not entered into 'record books'.
And it seems just as likely to me that this has always been the case.
If you have no instrumentation present then the record level cannot be officially observed, no matter how extreme the new record is, or, has been in the past.
But, regardless of that the tenacity of Galveston residents is something to be admired. The worst weather catastrophe in US history took place during flooding at Galveston in September 1900, killing 8000, people.
The geographical location of Galveston is plainly a key issue. Storms last year, storms in 2017, many storms and floods since 1900, seem to point to one thing - If you build a city on a low level island by the sea, in a storm prone area, then you need to be thankful for the subsidised flood insurance you get, as a result of the area being a well known heightened flood risk zone.
I was talking to my friend in New York a couple of days ago about this, he just said, "well, it's Galveston, what do they expect". Harsh, but probably fair
Moderator Response:[BL] Throwing around statements like "it seems", "potentially", "if there is no", "it seems just as likely", "If you have no instrumentation present", etc. is just adding noise.
You went through this sort of behaviour on other threads. You are making an argument from incredulity.
Your misguided attempts to look at single events in isolation is as worthless here as it was on the UK temperature threads. Your statements prove nothing.
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cgfree59 at 14:15 PM on 3 August 2022It's the sun
Trying to find responses to Connolly et al 2021 in RAA on solar contribution to GW.
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Bob Loblaw at 10:14 AM on 3 August 2022From the eMail Bag: a review of a paper by Ziskin and Shaviv
Hello, yanirdz. Welcome to Skeptical Science, and I hope that this is a useful resource.
The short story is that the model used by Ziskin and Shaviv introduces an "indirect solar effect" that is based on an index (the AA index) that starts positive and grows over time (figure 4). All other forcings (direct solar, CO2, aerosols, etc.) represent a departure from equlibrium - i.e., they would have a value of zero in a stable climate, and a non-zero value would push temperatures away from that equilibrium (warmer, or colder, depending on whether the value is positive or negative).
Since the AA index is always positive, it is always "causing" a warming trend in the model output of temperature. And since the AA index increases over time, it pushes the temperature warmer and warmer. The AA index never has a value of zero, so it can never not contribute to warming in the model.
...and as a result, the observed warming over the past century gets "explained" by the "indirect solar effect", because the model is created in such a way that the "indirect solar effect" absolutely must cause warming. And since the "indirect solar effect" must cause warming, the fitting of the model to actual observations must reduce the warming effect of anything else (e.g., CO2).
Really short version: they assumed continuous warming due to the "indirect solar effect" when they built the model, and therefore their "conclusion" is not a conclusion, it is their original assumption.
Minor point: they have a multiplier (fudge factor) for the "indirect solar forcing" that hypothetically could have a zero value, making the AA index always zero, or even negative (see the last row in table 2 in their paper). The fitting process, though, finds it easier to use the always-positive AA index to "explain" the warming, instead of CO2 or direct solar, etc.
Feel free to ask any further questions.
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yanirdz at 09:15 AM on 3 August 2022From the eMail Bag: a review of a paper by Ziskin and Shaviv
Hi, In Israel Saviv is getting popolarity. This post is very important, but it is hard for non sceintifc person to understand it
If I want to summerize this post in simple language, few sentences so I could use for example in twitter - how do you suggest to do it? -
Bob Loblaw at 05:23 AM on 3 August 2022Record rain in St. Louis is what climate change looks like
macquigg:
"Atmosphere holds more water" is too simplistic to evaluate water cycle changes. It's true that warmer air hold more water vapour, which is likely to lead to increased evaporation, but that also means that somewhere, at some time, there will be more precipitation, too. Globally, evaporation = precipitation on any reasonably long time scale (months), and the question becomes one of "how does the local balance change?".
Most land areas receive more precipitation than they lose in evaporation. Oceans are the opposite. Proof? Rivers draining from land to ocean. A lot of global variations in vegetation are explained by climate classifications that include some sort of water balance considerations (precipitation minus evaporation). The classic is the Koppen system.
Soil moisture for agriculture can decrease even if local precipitation increases - if local evaporation increases even more. So "more precipitation" does not necessarily mean "wetter" from a soil perspective. And for agriculture without irrigation, when rain falls is critical. As the old story goes, farmers always complain about rain. Too much; not enough; not at the right time.
For municipal uses, storage can help with seasonal and annual variability, but it can't make up for long-term expectations that want to use more water than is available from the long-term average.
Very local predictions from global climate models are hard to do, but Michael Sweet has pointed you to some possible sources of information.
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michael sweet at 02:45 AM on 3 August 2022Record rain in St. Louis is what climate change looks like
The 4th National Climate Assessment (2018) is located here. It is a good start and is easy to read. They have a Southwest section. Googling climate models Arizona also gets several useful hits. The 5th assessment is due next year.
The first rule of thumb is wet places will get wetter and dry places will get dryer. In addition, when rain arrives more will come in big days with longer dry periods in between. The US Southwest is expected to get dryer. When the land drys out the temperatures go up since evaporating water cools the ground.
Water from the Colorado river was allocated during a particularly wet period. The future flow is expected to be a lot lower than it was in the past.
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macquigg at 01:08 AM on 3 August 2022Record rain in St. Louis is what climate change looks like
I live in Southeast Arizona, at the edge of an expanding drought area affecting the entire Southwest. I have been trying to understand how global warming might make this better or worse. It could go either way - more rain because the atmosphere holds more water, or less because climate change is always bad. Are there any reliable predictions, based on climate models or other scientific reasoning?
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:15 AM on 2 August 2022Taking the Temperature: a dispatch from the UK
fixitsan's comment @88 included the following enlightening bit: "I did not indicate any relationship between temperature and CO2 levels at all" That appears to indicate a powerful 'need' to deny that there is any relationship between increasing CO2 levels and global average surface temperature (and the related harmful regional/local impacts).
The relationship between temperature and CO2, and harmful consequences, is fairly obvious today. It was pretty clear in the rigorous evaluation of evidence at the time of the 1990 IPCC report. And it has become increasingly obvious since then.
The CO2-temperature relationship was particularly well displayed by the image in Bob Loblaw's comment @47 (which I referred to in my comment @51 that opens with the bit that fixitsan chose to take exception to @88).
